Chapter 17 #2
“How much?” he asks.
“At first, more than I should have.” My voice shakes, and I force it steady. “Later, less. Then fragments. Then guesses. I started delaying things. I started holding back.”
“You expect that to matter to me.”
“I expect nothing from you right now.”
He stares at me, and the rage in him is controlled enough to be frightening. “Who put you here?”
“My father did.”
“No. I know who ordered it.” His voice cuts harder. “I’m asking what he asked you to do.”
I close my eyes for a second, then open them. “Get close. Listen. Learn your patterns. Track your pressure points. Watch how you moved your men and where you shifted freight when you were hit on one side. If there was a chance to push you toward a bad decision, I was supposed to help create it.”
His face changes at that, growing remote and far colder.
“And did you?”
The shame comes up hot and immediate. “At the beginning, yes.”
He goes very still.
I keep talking before fear shuts me up. “I told myself it was survival, that your world runs on leverage and everyone lies and I was only doing what I had to do. Then Roarke died, and things changed, and you changed, and he started asking for more than I could stomach. He wanted reaction windows, timing, your blind spots, and I stopped giving him clean information.”
“You stopped after you got attached?”
I look at him and don’t dodge it. “Yes.”
His mouth twists, and he drags a hand over his face. “Jesus Christ.”
“My name isn’t Riley,” I say quietly. “It’s Saoirse.”
He laughs bitterly. “You think the real name helps?”
“No.” I shake my head and will the tears away. “I’m telling you the truth while I still can.”
“While you still can.” He repeats it and points at me. “Do you hear yourself? You’re standing in my study choosing your wording after months of lying in my house.”
Tears push at my eyes, and I hate them. “I know what I did.”
“You do not.” He takes another step forward, and the desk is no longer between us.
“You have no idea what tonight could have cost me. Men were in my docks with charges and cutters, and I’m taking calls from your father while I’m driving back to find you wrapped in my mother’s blanket in my sitting room. ”
“I didn’t know about the docks.”
“Didn’t you?”
“No.” I meet his eyes and hold it. “I swear to you, I didn’t.”
He searches my face, looking for the slip, the practiced line, the tell. There isn’t one left. I’m too tired, too afraid, and too done.
“He threatened me last night,” I say.
Cillian’s expression shifts, not into kindness, but into focus sharp enough to cut. “What did he say?”
“He said I was protecting you. He said I was slipping.” My arms fold around myself without permission. “He said if I betrayed him, he’d finish me.”
“While you were under my roof.”
“Yes.”
“And you still kept this from me.”
“I was trying to find a way to tell you without getting you killed faster.” The words come out rough now.
“I know that sounds insane. I know it does. I came to your office before you left tonight, and I was going to tell you everything, but the room was full and you were already moving men and I lost my nerve for one more hour.”
He looks like he wants to throw something. He looks like he wants to tear the room apart and put it back in a shape he can trust.
Instead, he asks very quietly, “Do you love him?”
It takes me a second to understand who he means. “No,” I say.
“Your father.”
“No.”
He studies me.
“I’m afraid of him,” I say. “I obeyed him for years. I learned how to make myself useful so he’d stop looking at me like I was a debt he regretted paying. But I don’t love him.”
His breathing changes. He looks away, then back, and I know he is measuring what to do with me, not what to believe. Belief is already gone.
“I love you,” I say.
The words leave before I can shape them into anything safer. My voice breaks on the second word, and I don’t take them back. “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t plan it. I know I have no right to say it in this room, tonight, after all of this, but it’s true.”
For one second, something flickers across his face. Hurt. Real hurt. Then the anger closes over it.
“Don’t,” he says.
I keep going anyway, crying now and hating it and unable to stop.
“I know what I’ve done. I know I made a weapon of your trust and then stood here wanting things I didn’t deserve.
I know saying I love you doesn’t fix anything, and I’m not saying it to save myself.
I’m saying it since I won’t lie to you again. ”
His voice comes out low and lethal. “Pack your things.”
I freeze.
“Cillian.”
“Pack your things,” he repeats, louder now, and he points toward the door without taking his eyes off me. “You’re leaving tonight.”
My chest caves in around the air I’m trying to pull. “Please listen to me.”
“I listened.” He takes one step back and opens the distance between us like he cannot stand the sight of me close. “I listened while you told me my bed, my house, my men, and my dead were all fair ground for your father to reach through you.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“It’s what you did.”
I wipe at my face and fail to steady my hands. “If I leave tonight, he’ll come for me.”
He laughs once, cold and furious. “Then maybe you should’ve thought of that before you came through my gate under a false name.”
I stare at him, and the last small hope I carried into this room dies where I stand.
He opens the study door and doesn’t look at me when he speaks. “Pack,” he says. “Get out.”